...Dow is surely not kidding with its ability to buy silence (i.e. the company that exists today). Dow even dabbles in public health and journalism. In 1999 Hillsdale College received $500,000 for the Herbert H. Dow II Program in American Journalism. It is “devoted to the restoration of ethical, high-minded journalism standards and to the reformation of our cultural, political, and social practices.” That year the Dow Program sponsored Richard Lowry, Editor-in- Chief of the National Review, as a guest speaker. In his speech, titled “The High Priests of Journalism Truth, Morality, and the Media,” Lowry criticized American journalism for “reinforcing the radical side in America’s culture wars.”

Not likely to be recruited to speak is Linda Hunt who informs us that in her excellent 1991 book, “Secret Agenda,” that in 1951 Dow hired Otto Ambros, the Nazi war criminal convicted at Nuremberg for slavery and mass murder in the killing of thousands of Jews with nerve gas.

Dow’s close relationships with defacto state terrorists is also less likely to see curricula time at Hillsdale. [font color=darkred]In 1973 Dow was first company to receive a phone call from Pinochet’s military[/font] in 1973, according to Brandt, soon after his forces assassinated democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende, toppling his government, asking Dow to come back, which Dow “readily accepted” (a Dow official saluting the economic “miracle” of Pinochet).

One wonders how Hillsdale or PBS for that matter would explore the 1941 charge by the U.S. Justice Department that Dow conspired with the Nazi’s I.F. Farben to hold down magnesium production in the United States in the prewar era (Dow later pleaded nolo contendere)...

...Mary Evans, a 16-year-old junior at North Central High School, was in the crowd. She was headstrong and political, and she insisted on seeing Kennedy. She and a friend attended the rally with the friend's nervous father.

Evans was white and from a tony Northside family, but she was progressive and inquisitive and was not uncomfortable in the mostly black crowd. At first.

But as she waited for Kennedy, who was more than an hour late, word suddenly spread that King had been shot. The word was that he had survived after a gunman had tried to kill him. The gunman was presumed to be white.

"The temperature changed," Evans recalls. "I felt people started looking at me. Someone would take a step away, like I was a symbol of racism.

"I felt really white. I was really scared."

She thought about bolting but was in unfamiliar territory and had no idea which way to run...

[font color=blue]"It was like the feeling some people get in church," she says. "I was scared, and as soon as Kennedy spoke, I wasn't scared. I no longer felt white and isolated. I felt united in sadness with everyone else."[/font] ...

A lie with a billion dollars behind it is stronger than the truth. Peter Thiel has shut down Gawker.com...

Gawker.com is out of business because one wealthy person maliciously set out to destroy it, spending millions of dollars in secret, and succeeded. That is the only reason.

The strange and embarrassing thing about being the target of a conspiracy, an actual conspiracy, is that it undermines one’s own understanding of the world. It is true that Gawker was always a publication that took risks. It had bad manners and sometimes bad judgment. Occasionally, it published things that it would regret—just as, for instance, the New York Times has published things that it regrets.

What Thiel’s covert campaign against Gawker did was to invisibly change the terms of the risk calculation. The change begins with the post about Thiel’s sexual identity in a homophobic investor culture, the post Thiel now cites as the inspiration for his decision to destroy Gawker. It was solidly protected by media law and the First Amendment, as were the other posts that, as Thiel wrote, “attacked and mocked people”—specifically, his cohort of rising plutocrats in Silicon Valley. Hurting rich people’s feelings is, in principle, not a punishable offense...

[font color=darkred]Parkland and other movies about JFK's assassination show just how far to the right Hollywood has shifted. Alan J Pakula's classic film, however, is a high point of New American Cinema[/font]

Just about the only interesting things about the new Hollywood movie Parkland is its demonstration of how far Hollywood has shifted to the right over the last couple of decades...

After a couple of films in 1967 – the documentary Rush to Judgment and Bruce Conner's experimental short film Report – that critiqued the Warren commission's findings, in 1973 a Hollywood feature called Executive Action arrived. It mixed documentary footage with live action, and portrayed the assassination as a conspiracy by the CIA and big business interests. Executive Action is a decent, strangely low-key film; what's interesting is just how mainstream it was. Burt Lancaster played the CIA coup leader, while Robert Ryan and Will Geer played Texas oil men who want Kennedy dead. Dalton Trumbo, once blacklisted, wrote the script, and the film was directed by David Miller, whose CV contains another good picture, Lonely Are the Brave.

Hollywood later revisited the Kennedy assassination with Winter Kills (1979), based on Richard Condon's paranoid thriller; Ruby (1992), a stumbling biopic about Lee Harvey Oswald's killer Jack Ruby; and most famously in 1991 with JFK, Oliver Stone's epic mega-budget version of events. JFK is a hagiography of Kennedy theorist Jim Garrison, a bombastic New Orleans prosecutor and homophobe who tried to convict a gay CIA associate, Clay Shaw, of the president's murder. Garrison's case was ultimately unconvincing: a jury found Shaw innocent, which undercuts Stone's telling of history. Nevertheless, the film provoked a public outcry and led to the release of thousands of previously secret files by the Assassination Records Review board.

For my money, the best JFK conspiracy movie isn't, strictly speaking, about the Kennedy assassination. Made in 1974, Alan J Pakula's The Parallax View borrows from the murders of both Kennedy brothers to tell the tale of a mysterious organisation, the Parallax Corporation, which deals in political assassination and the creation of "lone assassin" patsies. ...

Shows up! Trump v. Putin, the German far-Right's media strategy, and a brand new BNCH for migration.

Here's one segment...

Breaking News Consumer's Handbook: Migration Edition (Abroad)

Jul 29, 2016

Migration and refugees have been in the news a lot in the last two years; a deeper understanding of migration and refugees, unfortunately, has not. From misleading language to distorted facts to the abuse of the very term "breaking news" (when in fact emigration, particularly into Europe, tends to remain constant) -- coverage of refugees and migration is all too often predictably poor.

Brooke talks with Heaven Crawley, Coventry University's International Migration Chair, about mass migration myths and how to identify them when they crop up in the news. The result is Part One of our Breaking News Consumer's Handbook: Migration Edition.